Passengers waited hours at a Mexican airport for information on flights, some of which were ultimately canceled.

Thousands delayed in Mexico as tech trouble hits United

By: Claude Solnik August 28, 2016Comments Off on Thousands delayed in Mexico as tech trouble hits United

Thousands of travelers were plunged into extensive delays on Saturday in Cancun, Mexico, after problems with a cable shut down software systems used to check in passengers at United Airlines, which began processing them manually and through backup systems.

David Rishmaway, station supervisor for United in Cancun, said a Telmex fiber optic cable used by United as well as several other smaller airlines reaching from near Mexico City to Cancun was affected as of 3 a.m. on Saturday.

He said that in addition to United, Sun Country and Sun Wing Airlines, far smaller, were impacted, leading to delays for those passengers as well.

Travelers from much of the nation, ranging from Long Island to Los Angeles, were impacted as United’s self-check in and passenger processing computers at kiosks in Cancun went down for more than a half a day on one of the busier travel days of the year.

The problems were fixed after roughly 13 hours by just before six p.m. Saturday, after long delays and a chaotic scene in which passengers waited on lines for hours, sitting on suitcases and the floor, unsure of what to do and what had caused the problems.

Even after the problem was resolved, United Flight 1676, a Boeing 739 carrying several hundred passengers to Newark International Airport, including some Long Islanders, was cancelled following delays.

Airline employees said that delays had lasted so long that at least one crew member was not able to fly, due to limits on flying hours without rest, leading to the cancellation.

Passengers on Flight 1676 were bused to hotels to spend the night, before taking the rescheduled flight on Sunday morning.

United had about 20 flights leaving on Saturday from the airport in Cancun, a vacation hotspot that also serves Playa Del Carmen.

The United self check-in screen said “action canceled” when passengers tried to check in to obtain boarding passes or luggage tags.

The screen said the “page may be temporarily unavailable,” as passengers found out the down side of depending heavily on computers, when there was no immediate back up.

United personnel carried passports up to an office where computers still operated, to check in passengers and compare to passenger logs.

The problem pointed to the chaos that can be caused when airline systems on the ground fail especially as more passengers rely on self check in, designed to speed the process.

“Airlines and people have been losing communication,” Rishmawy, United’s supervisor in Terminal 3 in Cancun, said Saturday, adding that at least 2,500 United passengers had been affected. “Call Playa del Carmen. Some calls go through, some do not go.”

He said that the airline did not have a backup line that it could shift to for self-check in and its terminals in case of such an issue, but shifted to other computers in United’s main office at the terminal, after computers at the check in lines went down.

“In Mexico since it’s only one company, Telmex, you have to go through their line,” he said, noting the airline wasn’t able to instantaneously shift to a backup line.

Passengers waiting on long lines were told conflicting information, moving from line to line, uncertain of what had occurred and when things would be remedied.

Delta Airlines’ systems went down recently, leading to massive delays, which prompted some to worry that United also had lost access to all its systems worldwide, which wasn’t the case.

“This is highly disorganized,” said one Long Island resident amid the delays. “There’s no communication between the airline. Each employee tells you a different story.”

“They’re not organized enough,” Murat Tiryaki, scheduled for a 5:20 p.m. flight to Los Angeles, said at 6:30 p.m. “Nobody’s telling us anything.”

A line stretched the length of Terminal 3 with United passengers sitting on the floor and on suitcases, ending a vacation in a line with their luggage and a kind of limbo, unsure of what had occurred or when they would leave.

“No communication. No updates on the screen. No one to talk to,” said Vange Salud, traveling back to Los Angeles with five other members of his family. “They made us wait in line and there is no line.”

Announcements were made periodically, asking passengers of flights in sequence to advance toward the check-in counter.

“They’re calling by flight,” Salud added. “We had to find out that ourselves. There is no line. You have to listen for the number and go.”

Screens said that all flights were delayed, but didn’t indicate how long in many cases, although Rishmawy said he expected delays wouldn’t last longer than three hours.

He added, however, that people weren’t told exactly how long delays would last before the problem was fixed, because the airline wasn’t sure of a timeline.

“How long, I don’t know,” Rishmawy said about a half hour before the problem was resolved. “If I tell you thirty minutes, you say I told you thirty minutes.”

Once the self check-in computers went live again, that didn’t solve problems for many travelers, who found out that they were unable to use the kiosks.

“We can’t even print our boarding passes. It’s past our time to check in luggage,” Salud said, after hurrying to the kiosk to get luggage tags only to find he would have to return to line. “We’re back to square one.”

Although most United passengers were able to board delayed flight, at least several hundred found themselves forced to go back through Customs and to stay overnight.

One passenger said she had originally planned to leave the night before, but had stayed an additional day, only to end up caught in this snafu.